I was just reading some article on Bobby Borisov’s linuxiac site this morning, when another “trending” article of his hit my eye, so I had to open that as well.
That article of his is titled “End of Windows 10: Don’t Worry Be Happy“, and like the title suggests, it’s for the Windows 10 users who still are not sure what to do after October of this year, when Microsoft will end its support for that OS.
Unlike some of his commenters, who – more or less predictably – started pro and con arguments about his recommended distributions, I found his article very clear and precise, and I agree to most of it, so I consider this as recommended reading if you’re in the target group (Linux newbies, Windows converts so to say).
Just some thoughts follow:
His first “con” point is the learning curve this implies, and he is true. This shouldn’t put you off too much tho, and I have examples. My aunt in Cologne is 85 years old now, and when we – my brother Willi (RIP) and me – first installed Ubuntu on a machine which was a present for her, she didn’t like it at all. In the end, she got so used to it that she upgraded to newer versions of Ubuntu herself, without any help from my late brother who lived nearby. And Willi himself was a psychologist, not a computer nerd, but when he changed from Ubuntu to Debian himself (my recommendation), he never looked back. So yes, there *is* a learning curve of course, like with most things in life, but it shouldn’t put anyone off; help will always be at hand (although I also saw the RTFM which one commenter mentioned in regard of Debian) 😉
One point on which I don’t really approve that much is when Bobby wrote:
“And yes, it gets even better: you’re not limited to just one. On Linux, you can install multiple desktop environments side by side and switch between them whenever you like.”
Well… I try a lot, and on my partition with Arch Linux I have both Gnome and KDE desktops, but usually I don’t switch between them that often. The reason is that while you can tell these different desktops to *not* change your desktop – as in the “working area” that much (normally each one would leave more or less its own widgets, symbolic links like folders, or a trash can), it’s still a pain the the proverbial back side, as they all use different fonts and leave more configurations than you would like in your /home directory – so when coming back to Gnome from KDE for instance, it *will* look different than before. And I don’t like to mess around with desktops too much, or to reset Gnome to its defaults, only to apply my own stuff again later.
So to see different desktops I normally use VMs, like here:
What you’re seeing there is my Arch Linux running both the upcoming Debian 13 Trixie (using Gnome and conky on it) and OpenSuse Tumbleweed which is just a rolling release distro like Arch – and it’s getting the new KDE Plasma 6.4 desktop environment which was mentioned in Bobby’s first mentioned article from above.
And yes, like some commenter wrote, I didn’t even have to open a terminal to upgrade from KDE Plasma 6.3.5 to 6.4, the discover service on OpenSuse informed me with a little red dot about those updates. And Gnome on Debian usually does the same.
OpenSuse Tumbleweed (Bobby recommended Leap instead) might even be better than Arch as a rolling release distribution, because you can also roll back easily, while Arch really has a steeper learning curve, and I wouldn’t recommend that to newbies…
But anyway – I just wanted to recommend Bobby’s site, because he writes more often and far better than me about this stuff. I usually find his articles via LXer – there are many more links to Linux-related stuff on that site, so that one’s recommended as well.
Like always, thanks for reading.